University Receives Grant to Prevent Cyberbullying

The U.S. National Science Foundation has given Rutgers University a grant to develop a system to automatically detect cyberbullying.

Credit: Letaba Herald

Rutgers University has received a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to develop a system that automatically detects cyberbullying.

The project aims to define newer approaches for automatic identification of cyberbullying by integrating the relevant research in social sciences and computer science, according to Rutgers researcher Vivek Singh.

The researchers say they also have developed automated techniques to detect cyberbullying within messages by text mining cyber conversations.

The project will run for two years beginning July 2015, during which the researchers will test different approaches and algorithms to identify the most suitable methods for cyberbullying detection. "For example, a specific school district may want to create a safer Twitter app that employs the algorithm developed by this project to [automatically] flag cyberbullying messages," Singh says.

Rutgers psychology researcher Lauren Hoffman says the project should improve the understanding of the social atmosphere in which cyberbullying takes place and enable enhanced supervision of online behavior.

"The generated data set will be made available to the larger research community, thus again enabling new findings that can help counter the social problem of cyberbullying," Singh notes.